So how long should you stay in a firm? Clearly, there is no universal answer, but here are a few cautionary tales. Back in the early 1970s, Mark Granovetter was the first to notice an intriguing tendency. He talked to several people ‘who seemed personable and intelligent, who had stayed in one job for fifteen or more years, and had then had remarkable difficulty in job search’. He cites the case of ‘Victor O’, a chemical engineer. When Victor left the army he worked in one firm for two years, before going to work for a small company near Buffalo:
He held this job for eighteen and a half years; many of his workmates stayed there the whole time. The company was then bought out in a conglomerate acquisition, and Mr O’s position was eliminated. He began searching by contacting friends and acquaintances and by answering ads. He wrote to 115 companies; as time passed and his frustration mounted, he began keeping a scrapbook of the ads and his letters along with the responses.
None of these approaches resulted in a job, and Mr O became angry and unhappy. From this and many other cases, Granovetter concludes that ‘long job tenure cuts off the accumulation of personal contacts and thus reduces the chances for mobility’.56
Recently, I met an old colleague from Shell International. Let’s call him ‘Adam’. He stayed longer than I did–eight years in total. ‘I should have left earlier,’ he says, comparing himself to his best friends in the firm. ‘James went into headhunting, Steve and Rick into venture capital–they all stayed less than half the time I did. They ended up with more interesting jobs and they made far more money.’ Adam then joined a small firm, where he still works, fifteen years later. ‘In the last recession, I felt that I should leave, but it was a tough time for the firm and I felt some obligation to stay and help put the business back on track again…To be brutally frank, moving here was a mistake, and staying here was a worse one.’
Now, Adam has not done at all badly. But by staying in two firms for a total of twenty-three years, he has gradually moved from the fast to the slow lane. He has not renewed his contacts in the same way as former colleagues have done; nor has he created a dispersed network of contacts by moving from hub to hub. He is as intelligent and personable as any of them, but he’s stayed in the same gene pools for too long.
As he walked me back to reception, I said it was great to see him again. ‘Yes,’ he replied ruefully, ‘but I have to admit that you’ve depressed me. I never realised the full consequences of staying put too long.’
I can relate to this, because I’ve been there myself. When I left business school, I thought I had landed the perfect job. Snazzy offices, first-class travel, bright and personable colleagues, interesting work, and the opportunity to learn about a whole new area, business strategy. I was confident and got on well with clients. But I didn’t impress most of my bosses. They felt I was weak at heavy-duty analysis. And they were right. So I redoubled my efforts. I put in eighty or ninety hours a week. I was always there on Saturdays and Sundays. I became tired. I started staying in the office at night and ordering in pizza, or popping out for a quick burger and fries. I had no time for exercise, so I put on weight and got chubby in the face. My personal relationships suffered. Most of all, work was my life, and I wasn’t even winning at that.
I stayed for four years and resigned just in time to avoid being fired. Looking back, I can’t believe I was so stupid to continue for as long as I did: two years was enough to learn almost everything, and then it stopped being fun. So I pretty much wasted two years; in fact, I went backwards in everything that mattered. But I know why I stayed: I didn’t want to admit defeat. I wanted to prove that I could win. Eventually I did the sensible thing and joined another firm where brilliant analysis was not the only measure of success. But by then my ego had doomed me to two years of misery.
‘Don’t underestimate the power of inertia,’ one of our respondents says. ‘I knew I should move, I knew I wasn’t happy, but I was too busy and thought I was too locked in financially to make the break.’
‘I reckon the ideal time is four to five years,’ says another. ‘Two years means you come and go. Any longer than five years and you’re stuck.’
On the other hand, it’s not necessary to move hubs very often. The fewest work hubs experienced by any of our interviewees was four; the most, nine. The typical time between moving hubs was four to six years, but this increased as the interviewees got older, perhaps because stability and pensions seem more important later in life. ‘You had better move quite a bit when you are young,’ one person says, ‘or you won’t move at all in later years.’
Regardless of how long we’ve spent in a hub, the most pressing reason to move is unhappiness. Yet, as we saw earlier, ‘the gravity of hubs’ tends to make us stay too long; and, paradoxically, we might cling most tenaciously to the hubs that make us most depressed.
When I co-owned a consulting business, a very intelligent consultant called John came into my office one day and said something that took me aback: ‘You’re ruining people’s lives by making them work too hard.’
‘What?’ was the best response I could muster.
‘You’re making people unhappy. They never see their wives, husbands or children,’ he said.
‘Who are these unhappy people?’
‘Well, me, for a start.’
‘I don’t want to lose you,’ I said, ‘but if you don’t like the job, why don’t you leave?’
‘I don’t want all the effort I’ve put into the job to be wasted,’ he replied, ‘and anyway, I still have to prove myself, to show that I can cope with the pressure.’
John stayed for another two years, but then he had to leave because he had a nervous breakdown. This troubled my conscience for a long time.
A friend who was a mayoral adviser in a large Portuguese city relates that she stayed in the job because it was well paid, near her home, introduced her to interesting people, and allowed her to bask in the status of representing the mayor. ‘But every time I wanted to do things, they didn’t agree with my proposals. It took me a long time to realise that they never would. There was a generation gap between employees and bosses.’
An American acquaintance, Anna, admits that she stayed too long in her job as an accountant. ‘The sad truth was that I didn’t like accounting. I could do the job, it was convenient, and I had a good relationship with my boss. But I hated being an accountant. Now I design websites and I love it. I work when I want, I work fewer hours, but I make more money. I wish I’d moved years earlier.’
The writer and broadcaster Charles Handy reckons he always used to stay in organisations for far too long. He finally became a freelance writer in his mid-forties, and only after his wife gave him an ultimatum: ‘I’m not prepared to continue living with a stressed-out zombie.’ He became much happier when independent of formal hubs. He found it a relief to be his own boss and not to have to pretend to be someone he wasn’t. Why did he stay so long in organisations where he was unhappy? Money, he says, and an unwillingness to take risks.57
We’ve seen many reasons why people end up trapped in unsuitable hubs. Many explanations revolve around personal insecurity–the need for money or status, the urge to demonstrate competence, fear of the unknown, wishing to live up to somebody else’s expectations, lack of time or contacts to find a new job, and risk aversion. How can we know when it’s time to move on, when a hub is good or bad for us? Our interviews suggest some easy diagnostics for bad hubs: those where we don’t feel at home or where we have divergent values; where we are frustrated or unfulfilled; where we feel underpaid or overworked; or simply where we are despondent.